Diffusion the situation: The alkali-ion storage in spinel lithium titanate (Li4Ti5O12) is comprehensively investigated. In Li4Ti5O12, Na storage is more dependent on the particle size compared to Li storage. Ab initio molecular dynamics simulations indicate that this can be attributed to the slow diffusion kinetics of Na+ in spinel Li4Ti5O12.

]]>Christian Amatore and Alison Downard Awarded 2014 RACI Medalshttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2196-0216/homepage/news/21926.en.html
2015-01-07T00:00:00+01:00The Electrochemistry Division of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) recently awarded the 2014 Bruno Breyer and RH Stokes Medals. We spoke to 2012 RH Stokes Medal recipient and ChemElectroChem Editorial Board member Professor Justin Gooding from the University of New South Wales, Australia, who provided the following comments:

"At the national congress of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI 2014) held from December 7th to the 12th, two prominent electrochemists were recognised by the Electrochemistry Division of the RACI. The Bruno Breyer Medal, for internationally recognised contributions in the field of electrochemistry was awarded to Professor Christian Amatore, Directeur de Recherche in CNRS and working at Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, who has been the recipient of may international prizes. Professor Amatore, presented with his medal by the Chair of the Electrochemistry Division Associate Professor Anthony O'Mullane, was recognised for his contributions to using electrochemistry to understand exocytosis from cells, advances in microelectrodes and the developments in electrochemical theory. The second medal awarded was the RH Stokes Medal awarded for distinguished research in the field of electrochemistry carried out mainly in Australasia. The 2014 recipient was Professor Alison Downard, seen here with former winner Professor Sam Adeloju, from Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand, for her work on the modification of electrodes surfaces using organic layers. The two medal recipients, along with a plenary my Professor Hubert Girault from EPFL in Lausanne, helped give electrochemistry a very prominent place RACI 2014."

The Editorial Team at ChemElectroChem congratulate Christian and Alison on being awarded these prestigious prizes!

Not what you might think: A new and non-invasive technique to probe the electrostatic interaction between surface-charged nanoparticles and a charged metal/solution interface shows that electrostatic effects are insignificant in all but very dilute electrolytes.

]]>2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Breaking the Barrierhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2196-0216/homepage/news/21493.en.html
2014-10-08T00:00:00+02:00The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Stefan W. Hell (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and German Cancer Research Center, Germany), W. E. Moerner (Stanford University, USA ), and Eric Betzig (Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA) "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. With the help of fluorescent molecules, the three scientists were able to work around the diffraction barrier a limitation stipulating that an optical microscope can never yield a resolution better than 200 nanometers. This diffraction barrier, proposed by the physicist Ernst Abbe in 1873, was considered unbreakable and had not been questioned for more than a century. Hell, Moerner and Betzig found brilliant ways to bypass this limitation. Their groundbreaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension, the Nobel committee said.

"The most important issue about the development of optical nanoscopy was that it showed that a physical limit that over years was thought to impede the applicability of far-field optical microscopy one of the most important tools for live-cell investigations can be overcome," says Professor Christian Eggeling (University of Oxford, UK), who has worked closely with Stefan Hell during the past years and is co-author of several of his highly cited publications. "This was based on the insight by Stefan Hell in the 1990s that nearby sample molecules are no longer discerned just by the phenomenon of focusing light, but by prompting them to briefly assume at least two different states (e.g. an on and an off state)."

Based on this principle, Hell developed a method called stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, in which two laser beams are utilized; one stimulates fluorescent molecules to glow while the other one cancels out all the fluorescence except for that in a nanometer-sized volume. Scanning over the sample yields an image with a resolution better than Abbe's stipulated limit. "I realized that silencing a fluorophore by stimulated emission or keeping it in a metastable dark state would be very powerful for separating fluorophores at sub-diffraction length scales," Hell told ChemPhysChem recently.

W. E. Moerner and Eric Betzig, working separately, laid the foundation for another method: single-molecule microscopy. This technique relies on the possibility to turn the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off. The same area is imaged repeatedly, but only a few molecules are allowed to glow each time. The images are then superimposed, yielding a dense super-image resolved at the nanolevel. "I am absolutely thrilled and very excited that the fields of single-molecule spectroscopy/imaging and super-resolution have been recognized in this way!" Moerner told ChemPhysChem. "While only three names were chosen, there are many researchers around the world who have contributed in essential ways, and all are to be congratulated," he added.

"These three researchers have laid the foundations for the field of nanoscopy or super-resolution microscopy," says Suliana Manley, Professor of Physics at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, EPFL, in Switzerland. "Moerner was the first to image single molecules in ambient conditions, a remarkable feat at the time; Hell performed the seminal development of STED, and was incredibly persistent, continuously improving the method and keeping the field alive with his breakthroughs; and Betzig made brilliant connections to go from spectral separation of emitters in near-field microscopy to temporal separation of fluorophores in far-field photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM)." Manley explains that the different methods, STED, PALM and structured illumination microscopy (SIM), compete in a very positive way. "All three have pushed to enable multicolor, live, 3D imaging, and historically the breakthroughs have come in bursts," she says.

"One of the challenges in biological imaging is that the sizes of cellular structures are inherently mismatched with the diffraction limit of light," says Dr. James Fitzpatrick (Salk Institute of Biological Studies, USA), a well-known researcher in the field of super-resolution imaging. "Take for example macromolecular structures such as nuclear pore complexes, the gates that control the flow of molecules between the nucleus and the rest of the cell. Their true size is on the order of 100 nm, yet distinguishing them from other cellular components can be challenging because they appear larger in traditional fluorescence images as a result of optical diffraction. Super-resolution imaging, using either localization or point-spread function engineering approaches overcome these limitations by allowing the visualization of such structures at higher fidelity than was previously thought possible."

Christian Eggeling agrees that super-resolution imaging techniques are crucial to biological research. "Tools such as STED nanoscopy have been implemented on turn-key instrumentation and have found widespread inset into open facilities of biological institutes, where the applications involve all biological and biomedical areas such as neurobiology, immunology, cancer research or plasma membrane organization and thus functionality of cellular receptors," he says. But there's still a lot of work to do, says James Fitzpatrick: "Pushing the envelope in terms of spatial resolution has been an incredible leap forward, allowing us to access and visualize the world within our cells at length scales previously unattainable. But continued research is required to couple these advances with the ability to visualize changes over shorter and shorter periods of time. Greater temporal resolution will be critical to understanding how structural changes resulting from disease, injury or aging compromise the function of living biological systems."

Nobel Prize in Physics 2014: A Bright Idea!http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2196-0216/homepage/news/21478.en.html
2014-10-07T00:00:00+02:00The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki (Meijo University and Nagoya University, Japan), Hiroshi Amano (Nagoya University, Japan), and Shuji Nakamura (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) for the invention of a new energy-efficient and environmentally friendly light source: the blue light-emitting diode (LED). Thanks to the blue LED, it is now possible to fabricate white light sources that have very high energy efficiencies and long lifetimes. The LED technology is used in many modern devices including the flashlights and screens of smart phones as well as new TV sets and computer screens.

Typically, red, green, and blue LEDs can be combined to generate white light, or a blue- or UV-emitting LED can illuminate a thin layer that then absorbs the energy and converts it into other colors. Although red and green LEDs have been around since the 1960s, the blue LED remained a challenge for three decades, despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry. This year' s Laureates made two important contributions that allowed the fabrication of efficient blue LEDs. The first one was to grow high-quality gallium nitride crystals and the second one was to dope them in the right way. "In semiconductors like this, you dope both electrons and holes, and it was the hole doping which was very difficult, but they succeeded in doing that too", said Per Delsing, Professor of Physics at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) and Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, in an interview directly after the prize announcement. "This way of making light is actually getting quite close to the theoretically possible way, so that every time you put in one electron, you get one particle of light a photon out These LED sources are actually going towards that goal", Delsing said. He pointed out that the current efficiency of LED sources has reached more than 50%.

LED lamps are constantly being improved, with the most recent record being >300 lm/W (lumen per Watt), compared to 16 lm/W for regular light bulbs and close to 70 lm/W for fluorescent lamps. Materials consumption is also diminished, with LEDs lasting up to 100000 hours, compared to 1000 hours for incandescent bulbs and 10000 hours for fluorescent lights. In contrast to fluorescent light sources, LED lamps do not use mercury, and because of their low power requirements, they can also be operated using cheap local solar power.

]]>Lo Gorton Honored by the International Society of Electrochemistryhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2196-0216/homepage/news/21447.en.html
2014-09-26T00:00:00+02:00"From Meldola Blue to Cyanobacter 30 Years of Bioelectrochemistry:" That was the title of this year's Katsumi Niki Prize Lecture, held by Professor Lo Gorton (Lund University, Sweden) at the 65th meeting of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Gorton was invited to give the lecture as the recipient of the 2013 Katsumi Niki Prize for Bioelectrochemistry. "It means a lot to receive such a prize showing that your research is truly recognized worldwide," he says. The Swedish scientist is particularly known for his studies on the direct and indirect electrochemistry of enzymes. "Lo Gorton is a pioneer of modern bioelectrochemistry and has made impressive contributions over the past 30 years in bioanalytical chemistry, biosensing, selective detection in flow analysis, and mechanistic studies in bioelectrocatalysis," says Professor Woonsup Shin (Sogang University, Korea), who is Chair of the Bioelectrochemistry Division of the ISE and an active researcher in the fields of biosensors and electrochemical energy conversion.

According to Shin, Gorton has made important contributions to our understanding of electrocatalytic reactions at dye-modified electrodes; the study of direct and mediated electron-transfer processes of redox enzymes immobilized on electrode surfaces; and the investigation of electron-transport mechanisms at the cellular level. "He is an author of more than 420 papers and they have been cited over 14 thousand times!" Shin says. "Lo Gorton is not only an excellent and recognized scientist but also a teacher and supervisor devoted to the exchange of science and borderless collaborations."

Bioelectrochemistry plays an important role in many areas. It involves research at the interface between chemistry, biology, and materials science/nanoscience to tackle everyday problems. "Recent discoveries in bioelectrochemistry have increased our understanding of Nature, have helped/will help in health care, and will greatly help mankind in future energy production," Gorton says. His invited lecture at the ISE meeting did not only cover the history of his work, but also a great part of the history of bioelectrochemistry. 30 years ago, Gorton showed that the dye Meldola Blue (MB, 8-dimethylamino-2,3-benzophenoxazine) not only strongly adsorbed on graphite to form a chemically modified electrode but also drastically lowered the high overpotential required for the electrooxidation of NADH (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, reduced form), a coenzyme present in all living cells. The reaction between MB and NADH was shown to occur through a charge-transfer complex. A few years later, he started to investigate direct electron-transfer processes between redox enzymes and electrodes. Since 2004, he has been exploring the mediated and direct electrochemical communication between bacterial cells and electrodes. His research is currently focused on photosynthetic membranes and cells including cyanobacteria (also called blue green algae), which account for 2030% of the primary photosynthetic activity on earth. "Meldola Blue was the dye Gorton used for the effective oxidation of NADH in his early career and Cyanobacter is a much more complex system," Shin says. "He is now trying to figure out the electron-transfer pathway in the cell and with electrodes."

Lo Gorton was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1949. He received a Bachelor's degree in genetics, botany, and microbiology at Lund University in 1971 and a Master's degree in chemistry two years later from the same university. He earned his PhD in analytical chemistry in 1981. Gorton has received many distinctions and was elected Fellow of the ISE in 2012. He is one of the Board Members of ChemElectroChem.

]]>ChemElectroChem 07/2014: Materials and Methodshttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2196-0216/homepage/news/21138.en.html
2014-07-15T00:00:00+02:00Issue 7 contains a mixture of reviews, full papers, and communications covering very different areas in electrochemistry. In a Review, B. Van der Bruggen and colleagues describe "electrokinetic remediation" as a suitable technique for the restoration of saline soil and the control of seawater intrusion. In the Articles section, J. Roncali and co-workers report on the production of nanostructured conjugated polymers by electropolymerization of tailored tetrahedral precursors, and D. S. Silvester, D. W. M. Arrigan et al. present their results on the electrochemical characterization of an oleyl-coated magnetite nanoparticle-modified electrode. The Communication by P. Schmuki and colleagues shows that controlled thermal annealing can tune the photoelectrochemical properties of nanochanneled tin-oxide structures.

Role of Counter Charges: The impact of various counter-electrode (CE) materials on the redox processes prior to resistive switching is investigated. The different catalytic activities of CEs towards the water redox process determines the defect concentration within resistively switching oxides.

An artificial DNA cutter with high site-specificity, was successfully developed by the combination of cerium(IV)/EDTA and two ethylenediamine-N,N,N,N-tetrakis(methylenephosphonic acid)-oligonucleotide conjugates. By using this DNA cutter, the sense strand of blue fluorescent protein (BFP) gene was selectively cut at a predetermined site in the chromophore-coding region. The upstream fragment obtained by the site-selective scission was ligated with a downstream fragment of the closely related green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene. The recombinant gene was successfully expressed in E. coli and the chimeric chromophore emitted green fluorescence as expected.